On the third floor of a multi-tenant building, a man crouches in a dim booth and waits at the phone. When it rings, a 300-yen-a-pop battle begins. He sizes the caller up by voice alone, draws out her age and looks, and if the deal closes they meet at a nearby coffee shop. A miss, and he waits for the next call. In the entertainment districts of the 1990s, buildings lined with such booths were ordinary.

Terekura (Japanese: テレクラ, telephone club) is a face-to-face meeting-brokerage trade in which a male customer enters a membership phone booth and receives unsolicited calls from women outside to arrange a meeting. The first shop appeared in Shinjuku in 1985, and the form spread nationwide by the mid-1990s. Under the Amusement Business Act it is positioned as a “telephone dating-introduction business,” now under notification-based regulation.

How the trade works

The mechanism was simple. The man becomes a member at the shop, pays, and enters a booth holding only a telephone. He waits for calls from women who dial the number printed on free street tissues and flyers distributed by the shop; he cannot dial out, only receive in a one-way structure. The man thus gets the experience of “women speaking to him without his having to solicit,” while the woman gets the freedom of “free” calls she can end at any time. The asymmetry between the two underpinned the trade’s economics.

Pricing was by time, around 4,000 to 6,000 yen an hour at peak, with fragmentary call-by-call talk continuing until a deal was struck and the pair met outside. Since the shop took no part in what followed, it presented itself on the surface as a “call service,” not a sex trade. This pretence later became the ground for its regulation as a sex-related business.

History

In 1985 the company “Telephone Club” is said to have opened its first shop in Shinjuku’s Kabukicho. With few communication means beyond the fixed telephone, a man’s channel to speak directly with unspecified women was extremely limited. The tailwind of the bubble economy met women’s demand for pocket money, and from around 1990 the form spread to the entertainment districts of major cities nationwide, said to exceed 4,000 shops at the mid-1990s peak.

The turning point came around 1996. The entry of schoolgirls and the resulting problematisation of compensated dating were reported daily. Named as the “gateway to compensated dating,” terekura faced frequent joint crackdowns by police and education boards. The 1999 enforcement of the child prostitution and pornography law surfaced the risk of contact with minors and forced shops to tighten membership control. The decisive blow was the 2001 revision of the Amusement Business Act, which folded terekura into a new “telephone dating-introduction business” category under notification. At the same time the spread of dating sites and internet-enabled mobile phones removed the need to go to a booth. Shop numbers fell rapidly through the 2000s, leaving only a handful even in major cities by the 2010s.

Derivative forms

Several offshoots arose around terekura. The “two-shot dial,” connecting from a home phone without going to a shop, flourished as a simplified version in the late 1990s. The “message dial,” leaving recorded messages, was more anonymous. These functioned as substitutes for the booth in the era of fixed phones and push-button lines. After mobile phones spread, the main arena of meeting shifted to live chat, dating sites, and later papa-katsu. The terekura pattern of “waiting for calls from unspecified women” is carried on, reshaped, in waiting for women streamers on live chat and “likes” on dating apps.

Cultural reference

The terekura of the 1990s was a staple subject for the subculture magazines and weeklies of the day, recurring in the sociological fieldwork of Miyadai Shinji and others, treated alongside burusera and compensated dating as a keyword symbolising “the girl and sex in the 1990s.” The first-person-filming culture of amateur street pickups also drew its early shooting material from terekura meetings. Standing outside the sex trade proper, terekura nonetheless functioned as a talent and material source for the adult industry, a relay point in its history.

See also

• Compensated dating
• Dating sites
• Papa-katsu
• Live chat
• Fuzoku (sex industry)
• Hamedori